Misfits and Wonderland: Seven Pups for Seven People

We start with six foul-mouthed young criminals on their first day of community service: a slutty one, a chavvy one, a violent one, an angry one, a weird one and an Irish one who talks too much. Misfits (E4) is like the Breakfast Club, turned up to 11. They do not have a redeeming feature between them.

Within minutes, they're getting a dressing down from their probation worker for failing to paint benches properly. If this were merely a sweary version of the Breakfast Club turned up to 11, this would be the point when the germ of an unlikely bond would start to form, and eventually the misfits would become friends, united in their hatred of authority. But this is not what happens. What happens next is a hailstone the size of a fridge lands on a car. Then a few more fall. Then the young offenders are jointly struck by lightning, leaving them with special powers: one can stop time, one can turn invisible, one can hear thoughts, and one has the power to make men lust after her by touching them.

That's only four, you say. Well spotted. The Irish one who talks too much doesn't get a power, or if he has one, he doesn't know what it is yet. And the violent one is already dead – killed by his probation worker, who has been turned into a shiny-eyed, marauding monster, a bit like the Hulk but without his sense of fair play.

Misfits is indeed silly – sillier, even, than it sounds – but it's also brilliant: sharp, funny, dark and, in places, quite chilling. Both the writing and the performances ensure that everything but the preposterous central premise remains entirely believable.

While both the style and plot of Misfits borrow liberally from the horror genre (there's an axe through the door at one point, straight from The Shining), they only do so to confound your expectations. These new superheroes do not find their powers remotely redemptive – at least not yet – and the only thing that unites them is the sheer amount of trouble they've got themselves into. They've managed to murder their probation worker without first procuring any evidence to prove he was a killer zombie. By the end of the episode, they're tipping two bodies out of wheelchairs into a pit under an overpass while still wearing their orange Community Payback boiler suits. "I'm pretty sure this breaches the terms of my Asbo," says the Irish one. To hell with vampires.

In Wonderland: Seven Pups for Seven People (BBC2), Uggs the Staffordshire bull terrier has given birth to seven puppies: Guv, Karma, Tank, Dolce, Boycee, Biff and Chaos. Uggs's owner Jackie needs to find them seven homes and, this being the East End of London, she expects to get between £250 and £400 apiece, which she is hoping will pay for a new floor. With that many staffies pawing around the place, she'll probably need one every six months.

Chaos is going to Donna, the dog-midwife, as payment. Donna already owns Kane, a guard dog of the type favoured by the Italian mafia. "He can be dangerous," says Donna. "He will go for a kid and he will go for an adult."

Boycee went to Jamie, who is paying in monthly instalments, and whose seven goldfish in a green, half-full tank serve as a shaky testament to his husbandry skills. Jamie can't afford Boycee's injections (he can't afford the monthly payments either, as it turns out) so the dog has to be kept inside, or taken around the park in a pram.

This instalment of Wonderland was always going to be more about the people than the dogs, and more about the larger community than pet-care. It managed to be wholly sympathetic without being any less alarming. One was conscious that a number of overlapping social problems – poverty, crime, alienation, unruly kids – were here being addressed by introducing big, hard-to-control dogs into the equation, and that it wasn't helping. Some sweet but very under-exercised animals were about to make hard lives harder. Still, there were no easy lessons here, except perhaps one about breeding dogs for profit in a recession. Most of Uggs's pups were given away, and one of them came back. "You're not making anything," Jackie said. "It's just one big fucking headache."